Westminster Projection - 10 June 2019 Update

First Official Day of the Conservative Leadership Contest
Also 84th Anniversary of the foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous and The Old Pretender's 331th birthday

© Paul McCartney, 1973

Tug Of War 🔊

Mayxit Day #1 three days on, and rest assured this is only the first of several Mayxit Days. Just like Brexit there will be a second one for sure and possibly a third one. Right now she has only stood down as leader of the Conservative Party, officially opening that Tory leadership contest that looks more and more like a yard sale of shop-window dummies and would be an all-out laugh if it weren't to get the next PM elected only by a swarm of Little Englanders who did not even vote for their own party at the EU election. A contest that is starting to look like so much of a running joke that the rule-waiving 1922 Committee are ready to move the goalposts again before the number of contenders reaches the 19ish I predicted.

Recent polls since the EU election have proved more upsetting than ever before. First there was this first post-EU election poll from YouGov that sent everybody's head spinning, until Opinium published another one that sent their heads spinning the other way. And on its heels came yet another one that totally contradicted the previous two while totally supporting them. Weird times indeed when pollsters and voters feel equally disoriented and a set of random numbers could easily pass as a legitimate prediction of the next GE's outcome. A look at what polls delivered in the week before the EU election and in the weeks since shows how volatile and possibly disoriented the electorate has become.

Nothing tells 'electorate in disarray' like the shifts in voting intentions from the 2017 GE. The first three post-EU election polls confirm that the bulk of the Brexit Party vote comes from disgruntled Conservative voters while significantly fewer come from Labour. Then almost a third of 2017 Labour voters currently switch to the more credibly Europhile parties: LibDems, Greens and SNP. This should be a clear warning to Jeremy Corbyn: 'constructive ambiguity' loses him three times as many Remain-leaning voters than Leave-leaning voters. And a belated conversion to supporting a second EU membership referendum would probably not gain them back.

I also found it interesting to compare what polls had to say about UKIP's general election voting intentions in the period around the 2014 EU election and what they say about the Brexit Party this year. Below are trendlines for UKIP's and Brexit's GE voting intentions (remember NOT EU election voting intentions) from February to June of the EU election years. The big dots are their EU election actual results and the one on the far-right UKIP's 2015 GE result. The Brexit Party's trendline confirms a steep surge in early April until they did better than UKIP did five years ago. Interestingly their numbers then went down to a not-so-impressive 12% on the eve of the EU election and their EU success then boosted them again to a higher level than UKIP five years ago.

Note also that in both cases the EU election result was some 10% above GE voting intentions. The Brexit Party in 2019 came out 3% higher than UKIP in 2014 and the GE voting intentions show roughly the same gap over the period leading to the EU election. Then UKIP's voting intentions flatlined around 15% in late May 2014 while Brexit Party's voting intentions have continued to rise. So UKIP finishing 15% below their 2014 vote at the 2015 GE should not be taken as a prediction of what will happen to the Brexit Party. Right now it's quite the opposite as the Brexit unfinished business still boosts the Faragists to 20% and above and possibly the first party at a Snap GE Of 2019.

Some People Never Know 🔊

I rely here only on polls fielded after the EU election as changes in voting intentions clearly show it currently has some impact on might what happen at the next GE. Clearly more Brexit Party voters now feel emboldened to state their true choice after the EU election success, with Brexit voting intentions jumping from about 17% average just before the EU election to about 24% now. Current super-sample includes the last six published polls fielded from 28 May to 6 June. This results in a 11,194 super-sample with a theoretical 0.9% margin of error and here's what it says:

Of course these voting intentions show the influence of the EU election vote but even so they fail to exactly duplicate it. So I can only repeat what I already said in a different context and which was not well received even by people who should know better than entertain false hopes: it is both disingenuous and amateurish to pretend than the EU election results can in any way predict the result of other elections that will not happen for another two or three years. More on this later. Even if you believe in a snap GE happening, it won't be for another four months at least which is more than enough time for radical shifts in voting intentions. The three earliest polls in the super-sample also shed some interesting light on the 'class divide' (or vote by social grade if you like that one better).

Interesting and somewhat distressing is the fact that the combined right-wing vote is 8% higher among C2DEs than among ABC1s, including a stunning +10% for the Brexit Party. Which, knowing the already predicted disastrous impact of Brexit on the working class(es), conjures the image of turkeys coming home for Christmas. The stronger C2DE Labour vote, coming as it is from Leave-leaning areas in the Northern Powerhouse regions, does nothing to make this less disturbing.

Let 'Em In 🔊

The distribution of seats on such votes would be a major upset with the Brexit Party coming out of the blue (or turquoise or whatever shade that actually is) to a solid first place. Which would be a hitherto unthinkable first in British political history as even Labour had to wait for many years on the sidelines before becoming a major player. Right now Labour would find themselves in the awkward situation of being the second party and 130+ seats shy of a majority. Then the math is simple: PM Corbyn, or it could be PM Starmer by then, would need a formal deal with both the LibDems and the SNP, one that would have to go far beyond confidence and supply to secure a safeish 17-seat majority. The price for Number Ten would be no less than a second EU membership referendum, but by then probably one on rejoining the EU rather than not leaving it, and a second Scottish Independence referendum. Humiliating but unavoidable.

There is a lot of irony in the current polling. As you can see in the sequence of my seat projections since January, Labour were on a clear path to victory until everything went south in the last two weeks before the European election. Now we can only dream of what would have happened if Theresa May had not kicked the can down the road once too many and forced the UK into an EU election nobody wanted and nobody was prepared for. Then we would still probably have just a limited LibDems surgelet and no New Model Blackshirts in sight. This is May's legacy: she both killed her own party, having them now competing with the LibDems for third party status, and led the UK straight on into an uncontrollable mess. Aren't we going through interesting times indeed? Well done, Baroness Maidenhead.

For the time being I don't change my assessment of Change UK's future prospects despite their lemming moment. I never seriously saw them holding more than two seats so I guess the split-atop-the-split will have as little impact as the split itself had. There most certainly is a life after jumping ship, examples abound. But is there one after jumping boat? Chuka Umunna might find himself in a better situation now if standing as a LibDem, given the LibDems' current success in London polling. Ironically Heidi Allen might emerge as the sole winner as she was bound to lose her South Cambridgeshire seat to the LibDems but might now succeed herself under different colours. Quite a feat as not even Winston Churchill managed that and had to be parachuted into a new seat both when he ratted and again when he re-ratted (his own famous words).

Live And Let Die 🔊

If the Snap General Election of 2019 truly reflects what current polls predict, which I honestly doubt, then a mastodonic 331 seats would change hands. More than half of Commons and more than any party currently holds. Of course this would be an all-time high in reliably recorded parliamentary history as the two elections with the most changes (1945 with 279 seats changing hands and 1906 with 267) don't even come close. In case you wonder only 185 seats changed hands in 1997, but the 1992 GE had already started to erode the Tory majority. The summary of gains and losses shows that the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats would have dozens of reasons to be massively festive on Election Night. Even the SNP would suffer one loss if you listen to what the math said 🔊, though I wouldn't count this one as a definite certainty and anyway there is a natural limit to the number of seats the SNP can bag, while the LibDems and the Brexiteers have the whole of Great Britain as their playground.

I won't bore you with the full list of changes as it would be too long for enjoyable reading, but I tried to sum up the tsunami in the tables below. On one side how many seats each party holds right now and how they would switch, on the other how many seats each party would hold after the election and where they would come from.

On current polling results the election would be a Game-Of-Thronish bloodbath 🔊 for the Tory frontbench and the government payroll. The one major Portillo Moment would obviously be Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond losing his Runnymede seat to the Brexit Party by 2k votes. The rest of the fatality list would include the de facto Deputy Prime Minister David Lidington, the Paymaster General Jesse Norman, the Attorney General for England and Wales Geoffrey Cox, the Solicitor General for England and Wales Lucy Frazer, the Leader of Commons Mel Stride, thirteen Secretaries of State (Amber Rudd, Damian Hinds, Matt Hancock, Jeremy Hunt, David Gauke, Liam Fox, Jeremy Wright, Chris Grayling, Rory Stewart, Penny Mordaunt, Greg Clark, David Mundell and Stephen Barclay), twenty-two Ministers of State, seventeen Junior Ministers, twelve Private Secretaries, five Whips and three Lords Commissioners of the Treasury. Plus the current Chair and three Vice-Chairs of the Tory Party, the two current Acting Co-Chairs of the 1922 Committee (Charles Walker and Cheryl Gillan) and its former Chair (Graham Brady). On top of that Speaker John Bercow and the Tory Deputy Speaker Eleanor Laing would both be unseated by the Brexit Party.

Other unseated Conservative (or just until recently Conservative) celebrities would include Justine Greening, Oliver Letwin, Dominic Raab (to the LibDems), Andrea Leadsom, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Fallon, Crispin Blunt, Dominic Grieve, Grant Shapps, Tom Tugendhat, Steve Baker, Mark Francois, Stephen Crabb, Nick Boles, Bill Cash, Nicholas Soames and Sam Gyimah (to the Brexit Party). And I am quite sure you can fully see the irony in who loses to whom in that list. Even better, six of the eleven current Tory PM wannabes, plus the two who dropped off the race, would bite the dust (Jeremy Hunt, Matt Hancock, Penny Mordaunt, Dominic Raab, Rory Stewart, Sam Gyimah, James Cleverly and Kit Malthouse). Which would make for a less crowded field in the next Tory leadership contest after Boris Johnson's resignation in the fallout of annihilation. Downside is that Michael Gove would be the next Tory leader and make them even nastier. Upside is that Michael Gove would be the next Tory leader and bury them even deeper.

But Labour would have their fair share of Balls Moments too with a number of past and current stars losing their seats (Margaret Beckett, Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, Dennis Skinner, Sheffield Mayor Dan Jarvis, Jon Cruddas, Kate Hoey, Angela Rayner) plus eighteen members of the Shadow Cabinet. Symbolically one other notable loss would be Sedgefield, Tony Blair's old seat, switching to the Brexit Party. This election would also be exceptional in that both Fathers of the House, Kenneth Clarke and Dennis Skinner, would lose their seats to the Brexit Party. Protocoligorically (aye that's a word and you can look it up, it's the right one) Clarke is the Father but Skinner was elected at the same GE in 1970 and Clarke holds the title simply because he was sworn in first back then, and Skinner being eight years older doesn't count here.

The Mess 🔊

Current polls would deliver 142 marginal seats, exactly double of what we had after the 2017 GE. Again I will not bore you with the full list as a summary is enough to grasp the full extent of the new complexity brought on by vastly changed voting intentions. Not so long ago most marginals would have been the traditional red-on-blue or blue-on-red battlegrounds with a handful of orange and yellow spots here and there. Now we have a rainbowish sampler of almost all possible winner-runner-up combinations, which will make the parties' campaign managers' task even more daunting than it usually is, with a lot more uncertainty about who should be targeted first as the most dangerous opponent. Only the SNP would be spared such a dilemma as Scottish Labour have already self-destructed again and Scottish Tories are the preys of choice.

In this list nothing demonstrates the sorry state of both 'main' English parties better than Isle of Wight turning into a Greens-Brexit Party marginal after thirty years of Conservative dominance interrupted by just one LibDem term 1997-2001. It also shows that Scottish politics have taken a vastly different turn  with only three marginal seats instead of twenty in 2017, the direct result of the SNP cruising to a landslide and some 20% ahead of the nearest competitor, if not even more. Globally the alternate results now are no longer a case of which seats could swing back and forth between Tories and Labour, but rather of how harder the Brexit Party surge could hurt other parties or conversely how these parties could resist the tsunami. Here is my best estimate of where we could possibly end up:

If the other parties successfully fend off the Brexit Party, the potential Lab-SDLP-Lib coalition would fall only seven seats short of a majority, and reinforcements from Greens and Plaid Cymru would give them a two-seat majority. Which would be quite uncomfortable and Labour might want to seek some form of support from the SNP anyway. The Brexit Max scenario at the other end of the spectrum is both scarier and more interesting. In that case a Brexit Party-Conservative coalition would bag a seven-seat majority for a few minutes before a swarm of 'moderate' Tory MPs would defect to the LibDems, thus paving the way to yet another snap GE. Did I mention already that we're going through quite interesting times?

This Never Happened Before 🔊

I usually don't mention the technicalities of election projection because it's a bit like how sausages are made: I could explain but then I'd have to kill you. But psephologists now have one intriguing pressing matter on their hands as it looks like the projection models are pizzled by the new and unforeseen configuration of voting intentions. Not even the Scottish situation posed such a challenge to apparently well-oiled mechalgorithms. But then it was just a basic case of one party globally displacing another as the dominant player over a whole nation without much of real significance happening on the sidelines, so nothing the fundillymundilly two-dimensional nature of projection models could not handle. What we have now is quite different with voters crossing aisles in multiple directions, like in a seemingly Labour-Tory battleground suddenly turning into a LibDem-Brexit marginal. Here's an illustration with what my model and my two most renowned competitors (Electoral Calculus and Election Polling) make of the late May Opinium poll when fed with the exact same data:

But I don't read too much into this as projections based on the rolling average deliver quite similar results with all three models, so the Opinium shocker must be just some one-off freak. So don't distrust polls and projections more than you already do. All this says is that the media should be more cautious than ever when publishing seat projections, whatever the shock value of a 'Farage at Number Ten' headline. MSM would do a better service to their readers if they stopped focusing on juicy soundbites and instead discussed Farage's plan to sell the NHS to the highest-bidding American HMOs when healthcare costs per capita are more than double in the USA than in the UK according to OECD statistics. Then educating oiks is not a priority when fuelling doubt and insecurity with shocker headlines can help turn yesterday's self-fulfilling prophecies into tomorrow's self-evident truths. MSM will have to answer for that some day. Or they won't, will they?

Must Do Something About It 🔊 

Then came the Peterborough by-election and the self-fulfilling prophecy spectacularly unself-fulfilled (or should it be self-unfulfilled?). Anyway, media and bookies alike had already so convincingly elected the Brexit Party you had to wonder if the actual vote was really necessary, but the good people of Peterborough, and the bad people of Peterborough too, proved them wrong. Below is a reminder of the most recent election results for the constituency, and my own projection compared with the actual result. Quite good even if I missed the Tory and LibDem votes but there is the Third Law of FPTPics: just get the winner and the runner-up right, people won't even bother to look at what you said about the others. And I would not brag about it (or would I?) if it did not prove a point I already made repeatedly: EU election is not a predictor of any incoming GE. And pretending to 'predict' any specific result for a FPTP election based on the EU election results remains just a case of lazy amateurish cooshite, no matter how much the alleged 'result' suits your wishes.

The only unsurprising surprise was Jeremy Corbyn repeating his own variation of 'now is not the time' in the aftermath of this by-election that was truly too close for comfort. Then narrowly winning an election while losing 35% of your voters, and then painting it as a mandate to pursue failed policies, is obviously something we have to get accustomed to hearing from Labour. The Tories did not comment, which is probably just as well, though they could have bragged that 21% is an excellent and encouraging result after all, given their current standing in the polls.

What never ceases to amaze me is that the 2016 referendum made UKIP irrelevant because their one and only policy goal had been met, and the aftermath made a UKIPish offshoot rise from the ashes after both the English Government and the English Loyal Opposition made a dug's breakfast of pig's ears of the whole thing when they repeatedly failed to address the real issues and make the hard choices. One kicking the can down the road to the cliff edge while the other revelled in destructive ambiguity led us where we are now and the endgame will be messy for both their parties when the snap GE is called.

Of course that long-awaited snap GE will not happen tomorrow 🔊. First the new Prime Minister is expected to be chosen on 22 July, so we can expect the current lame-duck Commons session to last until 26 July at the very least so that the unavoidable confidence vote can be held and lost when a handful of Tory MPs turn against Boris Johnson. Here starts the tricky part of the final season, per provisions of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. Commons would have to sit for another fourteen calendar days (though probably not all days as they would have nothing to do other than wait at the bar, which by then would probably be off-limits for Ross Thomson) to make sure that alternative majorities could be considered, or not. Which would be quite akin to waiting for PM Godot as it is quite obvious no alternative majority could be found and surely Labour wouldn't even try. Then Elizabeth Windsor would have no other option than to prorogue Parliament, but not in the way Dominic Raab suggested and has already been shot down from all sides.

Because there are two very different meanings to prorogation. One is what Raab had in mind: ending the current session thus suspending Parliament until a formal State Opening marks the beginning of a new session, which PM Raab would have postponed until after Hallowexit. The other one, and the one that's relevant here, means closing down Parliament for good and starting the process for a General Election, which would have to take place at least 25 working days after dissolution. It's easy to see their is no humanly possible way to fit this before the sacrosanct Conference Recess which has to start no later than 12 September. This would push the snap GE to 10 or 17 October with all parties in the meantime crossing fingers for voters to get on the right thing 🔊 and move away from the Brexit Party, though you can't be sure all this circus would actually achieve that.

Upside then is that the EU would certainly be ready to consider discussing yet another Brextension to allow the newly elected Government to figure out some sort of Brexit Deal. Remember that starting a new Commons Session under the guidelines of a fresh Queen's Speech means that the reset button is hit and it's as if the whole farce of the last two years never happened. A Very English Dallas Season Nine. Downside is that the EU would almost certainly grant the third Brextension which might be taken as another excuse for kicking the can further down the road. But it you want to look at the bright side, it would also leave enough time for a comeback to sanity making revoking Article 50 the default option instead of No Deal if Commons still failed to pass a Withdrawal Agreement Bill 3.0. One can dream. Or can't he?

So brace yourselves for further upsets and stay tuned for the next updates

Cha togar m' fhearg gun dìoladh

© Paul McCartney, 1993